Mike Muuss began the initial architecture and design of BRL-CAD back in 1979. Development as a unified package began in 1983. The first public release was made in 1984. BRL-CAD became an open source project on December 21, 2004, with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses.

Mike Muuss began the initial architecture and design of BRL-CAD back in 1979. Development as a unified package began in 1983. The first public release was made in 1984. BRL-CAD became an open source project on December 21, 2004, with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses.

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'''Example(s):''' Example file from a BRL-CAD database outputted as ASCII. This file contains two objects: a pipe and an ellipse.

*** '''Implicit curves:''' - Can the format support implicit curves? Example: A format that can contain curves that are generated with mathematical equations that contain the independent variables x, y, and z, supports implicit curves.

*** '''Manifold surface meshes:''' - Can the format support manifold surface meshes? Example: A format that supports surfaces that are mathematical spaces in which every point has a neighborhood which resembles Euclidean space

*** '''Manifold volume meshes:''' - Can the format support manifold volume meshes? Example: A format that supports volumes that are mathematical spaces in which every point has a neighborhood which resembles Euclidean space

BRL-CAD supports a great variety of geometric representations including an extensive set of traditional CSG primitive implicit solids such as boxes, ellipsoids, cones, and tori, as well as explicit solids made from closed collections of Uniform B-Spline Surfaces, Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces, n-Manifold Geometry (NMG), and purely faceted mesh geometry. All geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG operations including union, intersection, and difference.

BRL-CAD is a collection of more than 400 tools, utilities, and applications comprising more than a million lines of source code. The package is intentionally designed to be extensively cross-platform and is actively developed on and maintained for many common operating system environments including for BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows among others. BRL-CAD is distributed in binary and source code form as free open source software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license terms.

History: For more than 20 years, BRL-CAD has been the primary tri-service solid modeling CAD system used by the U.S. military to model weapons systems for vulnerability and lethality analyses. The solid modeling system is frequently used in a wide range of military, academic, and industrial applications including in the design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and architecture. The package has also been used in radiation dose planning, medical visualization, computer graphics education, CSG concepts and modeling education, and system performance benchmark testing among other purposes.

Mike Muuss began the initial architecture and design of BRL-CAD back in 1979. Development as a unified package began in 1983. The first public release was made in 1984. BRL-CAD became an open source project on December 21, 2004, with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses.